The suburb’s name is thought to be derived from “the marshy land near the wall” – Hadrian’s Wall, which ran nearby, that is.

If the area has distant Roman connections, it has Viking ones too, with the town’s Scrogg Road thought to be named after ancient woodland in the area.

In much later times, not unlike other areas of Tyneside, Walker grew on the back of coalmining and shipbuilding.

Our picture collection from the Sunday Sun archive is centred mainly on the last century, and shows the people and places of a busy suburb.

If Walker has a strong shipbuilding heritage, it is fitting to remember the tragedy which rocked the local Neptune yard and the community in 1976. Just over 40 years ago, eight men died and six were injured in an explosion aboard the Royal Navy’s new £23m destroyer HMS Glasgow, which was being fitted out.

Three years after the disaster, HMS Glasgow was commissioned, and later took part in the 1981-82 Falklands conflict, where it was damaged by an Argentine bomb.

Elsewhere, at Rochester Dwellings in 1955, there were strange goings-on in one home that made the front page of our sister paper, The Chronicle.

When it was reported a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary and Jesus had begun weeping, hundreds of curious locals – believers and sceptics – started queueing around the block to see the statue, and some even prayed to it!

These were much more innocent, less cynical times, of course.

After several days of strangers trudging through their home, the family finally decided they’d had enough, locked their doors, and the incident gradually slipped out of local memory – until now.